Hi, first patch here and first post to pgsql-hackers. Here goes.
Enclosed please find a patch to tweak the documentation of the ALTER TABLE page. I believe this patch is ready to be applied to master and backported all the way to 9.2.
On the ALTER TABLE page, it currently notes that if you change the type of a column, even to a binary coercible type:
> any indexes on the affected columns must still be rebuilt.
It appears this hasn't been true for about eight years, since 367bc426a.
Here's the discussion of the topic from earlier today and yesterday:
I haven't run tests, but I presume they'll be unaffected by a documentation change.
I've made an effort to follow the example of other people's patches I looked at, but I haven't contributed here before. Happy to take another stab at this if this doesn't hit the mark — though I hope it does. I love and appreciate Postgresql and hope that I can do my little part to make it better.
For the moment, I haven't added this to commitfest. I don't know what it is, but I suspect this is small enough somebody will just pick it up.
Mike